To: technology-AT-world.std.com
From: SONDHEIM-AT-newschool.edu
Date:         22 May 94 21:15:52 EDT
Subject:      Merlin Donald


Malgosia askes for more information on Donald's book.

The full title is *Origins of the Modern Mind, Three States in the
Evolution of Culture and Cognition,* Harvard, 1991, HB, ISBM
0-674-64483-2, 413pp. Donald is Professor of Psychology at Queens. In
the work he outlines several stages of cognitive processing,
concentrating on the primates. They are: episodic culture (apes);
mimetic culture and its modalities; mythic culture and language
adaptation; and "external symbolic storage and theoretic culture."
The last section develops the notion of the "hybrid modern mind." In
the prologue Donald states that "One unusual aspect of this book is
its incorporation of biological and technological factors into a
single evolutionary continuum." I am particularly interested in the
_continuum_ aspect of this; I believe (and my own work is based on
this) that psychoanalytical operations (for lack of a better word)
are simultaneously internal- and externalized, and that technology
plays a major role here (see my Internet text, available from me or
at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~mariusw/futurec/sondheim ).

What is fascinating about Merlin's approach is its rendering problem-
atic the traditional notion of technology. Too often the (naive)
subject/object dichotomy clearly isolates technology which then
becomes a relation-to. Just as "nature" and the "natural" have limit-
points presumably independent of human cultural construct - and just
as these limit-points are increasingly absorbed or rendered imaginary
- so the "technological," once considered (say) an alienation or
addition to the "human," now is perceived, even within a pre-
cyborgian scenario, as an absorption or introjection of instrumental
rationality. If the subject is dispersed or dispersive in
contemporary philosophy, so is its interaction with techne, which now
appears (I would assume ontologically and epistemologically) on the
same continuum.

In which case the technology-list is always-already mind-L (and
perhaps lists such as Nexus-gaia are proof of that!).

(The blurb to Donald's book states: "In the third transition, when
huamns constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging from
cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages and
mathematics, human biological memory became an inadequate vehicle for
storing and processing our collective knowledge. The modern mind is
thus a hybrid structure built from vestiges of earlier biological
states as well as new external symbolic memory devices that have
radically altered its organization.")

Alan

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